Reunions and Returns

(This is the newsletter we sent to our subscribers last week.)

I have just come back from another genealogy tour we organized this year. In four days, in southeastern Poland, we met two different branches of our guests’ family. One branch of cousins we found only after we arrived in the village. It was a complete surprise for both sides – as it always is :-). The relatives in Poland had no idea that part of their family was living in the United States. Our guests would not have known about them either, if they had not asked us to research a few months before the trip.

But, as always, it was not only about documents and family meetings. Of course we went to the villages where their ancestors had lived. We also visited an open-air museum from their region in Kolbuszowa (the one where the Netflix series “1670” was filmed), Łańcut Castle, and we sat for two hours with a local historian.

Taken together, these kinds of moments give our guests a much fuller picture of how their ancestors lived before they left Poland. This is how we try to design each of the heritage tours.

The group was two cousins and their partners. Every day they sent news home to the rest of the family. And already they are talking about coming back in a year or two – this time with a larger group, so more of the family can meet their newly found relatives and see Poland together.

Then, just today, an email arrived from a man who traveled with his wife and me thirteen years ago. Next year he is returning with ten people: his parents, his own family, and his sister’s family.

Messages like this are among the greatest rewards of our work. A journey that began years ago becomes the beginning of another one – this time with parents, children, siblings, and cousins.

One more example. In August, a tour we took with Louie more than a dozen years ago brought his nephew and wife to Poland. They walked into the same house Louie once sat in: the original home built in 1827 by his great-great-grandfather Walek, now in the open-air museum in Opole. See this original story here: https://polishorigins.com/blog/2-sitting-down-in-my-gggrandfathers-house/ 

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A reunion on a much larger scale

Private family tours have always been at the heart of what we do. But it is not only individuals and families who come to us. Organizations also ask us to help create tailor-made heritage events.

This past May, together with the Polish-American Foundation for the Commemoration of the POW Camps in Szubin, we co-organized the official opening of the Tin Store Museum on the site of the former prisoner-of-war camp in Szubin.

For more than sixty descendants of Allied prisoners, it was much more than a museum opening. It was a deeply personal pilgrimage.

The wider program took everyone through the historic streets of Warsaw and Gdańsk, and brought 150 people together for a moving reunion dinner.

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Polish Christmas Tour – Wigilia Tour

Our 9-day Polish Christmas Tour takes you through Warsaw, Kraków, and Wrocław at one of the most beautiful times of the year. The group is small — six people at most — so the journey stays personal.

In Warsaw you will walk the historic Old Town, wander through the Christmas market, and see the Royal Castle and Royal Garden of Light at Wilanów Palace. On the way to Kraków we stop at the Ethnographic Park in Tokarnia, to see how people in Polish villages prepared for Christmas in the 18th and 19th centuries — traditions that may well have been part of your own family’s life. In Kraków you will explore the Old Town and Wawel Hill, see the famous Kraków nativity scenes, and make pierogi with your own hands. Then we go on to Wrocław, with its lovely historic center and one of Poland’s best-known Christmas markets.

At the end we return to Kraków for a traditional Wigilia dinner in a real Polish home — the dishes, the table, the quiet atmosphere of Christmas Eve.

You can find the full itinerary here: https://polishorigins.com/polish-christmas-tour/

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We still receive requests for 2026, but most new inquiries are now for 2027. Next year’s calendar is filling, and we have even had questions about 2029. If someone writes to us a few months in advance about a busy month such as September, our genealogist-guides may already be fully booked — and then we have to say no…

Our custom genealogy and history tours are not ready-made holiday packages. Preparation often takes weeks: research, scouting the villages, and careful work by our tour managers and genealogists before you even arrive.

If you dream of standing in the village your ancestors left – perhaps even at the door of their old house – of meeting relatives, or of sharing Poland with your whole family, please write to us as early as you can.

That gives us time to research, to plan, and to prepare the journey with the care your family story deserves.

 

Best wishes from the country of your ancestors!

Zenon and the entire PolishOrigins Team